Fashioning Bernice and Belinda: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Revision of Alexander Pope’s Mock Epic

After discovering Jay Gatsby’s murdered body, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, fails to find anyone who will grieve his friend’s death. While looking for phone numbers and addresses, he rummages through the unlocked drawers of Gatsby’s desk: “But there was nothing—only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence staring down from the wall.”¹ Having begun his narration by proclaiming himself “a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler,” Nick ironically ends his attempts to track down any official relative of Gatsby—Fitzgerald’s symbol of the myth of the self-made American—by suffering the silent stares of Dan Cody, the miner, pioneer, and millionaire under whose tutelage Gatsby reinvented himself.² In failing to mourn Gatsby collectively, then, the larger public of Fitzgerald’s novel has forgotten Cody’s bygone Western milieu and the history of violence through which his protégé’s fortune had passed.

While much has been said about the limits to Gatsby’s self-created identity stemming directly from America’s flawed understanding of its own historical narrative, less has been said about those of Fitzgerald’s characters who struggle to craft identities outside of or resistant to the cultural ideologies surrounding them. I would like to present the Middle West as the space in which Fitzgerald finds room to critique or disrupt the cultural ideologies attached to America’s growing agrarian empire. More specifically, the “forgotten violence” of Dan Cody’s picture flashes up in the barbershop mirror before Bernice, the heroine of Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” who negotiates the sexual and racial identities imposed upon her by the midwestern country-club culture of St. Paul. In reframing the legacy of the embattled frontier hidden beneath the surface of Cody’s picture through the mirror’s display of Bernice submitting to a bob, Fitzgerald encodes another enforced haircut that situates his fiction within the larger Atlantic world’s literary engagements with political and commercial projects of expansion. This other instance of hostile barbering is Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, which Fitzgerald rewrites through his depiction of Bernice’s unwilled haircut at the hands of her cousin, Marjorie. Pope’s poem focuses not only on his heroine’s hair and its mediation of her role as sexual subject and object but also on the luxurious spoils of ruthless mercantile accumulation that frame Belinda as a prize to be won through exploitation. Fitzgerald’s story ultimately twists this narrative to present a subversion of enforced sexual identity that, in turn, unsettles the race-based national narratives threatening to exclude his heroine. Shot through with strands of The Rape of the Lock’s contests for self-formation in the face of ideologies of gendered and commercial desire, Bernice’s struggle becomes one of turning her removal from the pool of attractive St. Paul debutantes into a furtive space for disrupting American teleologies of history, beauty, and identity—a space that ultimately turns out to be just as much a frontier as Cody’s West in The Great Gatsby.

Critical commentary on Fitzgerald’s shorter fiction has given “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” scant attention, and when it does look in that direction it has little to say about Bernice’s resistance to the forces fashioning either her racial or her sexual identity. Edmund Wilson discusses the story only in terms of Fitzgerald’s ability to capture a certain social milieu: the characters in “Bernice” have a “real connection with the background to which they have been assigned” and are “a part of the organism of St. Paul.”³ In his own essay on the story, Matthew J. Bruccoli follows suit and notes Fitzgerald’s “achievement as a social historian.”⁴ While defending Fitzgerald’s short stories against allegations of their being “just hack-work,” Bruccoli goes on to claim that “Bernice” “is not one of Fitzgerald’s greatest stories,” that it was “written as an entertainment,” and that its form is “obviously commercial.”⁵ One exception to this critical...